Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/267

230 world of sense cannot, then, be the individual as God and the angels know individuality.

So much for St. Thomas’s doctrine of Individuation. It sums itself up in the assertion, that, whereas the higher forms of conscious and rational individuality are definable in various and relatively intelligible, although still more or less empirical terms, corporeal individuals are, for us, although not for God, nor for the angels, nor in themselves, undefinable and ultimate facts, known to us only in so far as a communicable form gets embodied in one spatially determined and sensuously observable matter, so that the resulting composite nature is “singular and incommunicable.”

There can be little doubt that this doctrine of individuality is at once skilful and vulnerable. It formed a favourite object for attack in later scholastic discussion. Most noteworthy is the doctrine that Duns Scotus opposed to Thomas concerning this topic. Duns Scotus is the second of the two principal scholastic students of our problem.

The chief discussion of individuality in Duns Scotus occurs in the Angelology of the second part of the Subtle Doctor’s commentary upon the Sententiæ, in the first half of the sixth volume of his works. Duns Scotus employs, throughout, a widely known and, so far, purely formal definition of indi-